Archive for Knowledge management

I wrote this piece for Singapore’s Information and KM Society (IKMS) quarterly news magazine, GLOBE, (Growth Leadership Organisation Business Education) 4th Quarter, 2014. Madanmohan Rao was the editor. I wish I had a quarter of the energy Madanmohan has but I don’t. He has put together resources for knowledge management that I use on a regular basis.

The theme for the Globe quarterly was KM and the Learning Organisation. The LO has been around for long enough to become accepted wisdom. Of course, we all want to learn but…it’s so hard to learn…how to apply learning to make something truly new and different is even more difficult.

Fanta has been my favourite soft drink since I was a young boy growing up in the deep American south. I wondered how could anyone figure out how to make this great tasting stuff. Here is a story, maybe somewhat true, I’ve never been sure how much of it is and how much of it isn’t. Its a story which I’ve used over and over to illustrate how innovation requires having your back-up-against the wall and disaster seems just about to be a certainty but then, miraculously, an event occurs, a hero arrives, a problem is solved and the solution (sometimes) leads to great success.

I was a bit aprehensive about getting involved with anything called hackathon. For me and for a lot of others I suspect the word has connotations of electronically sneaking into an organizations computer system and stealing data. However, ‘hack‘ means something just done well as a verb and done playfully as a noun, at least according to that great resource of modern English usage the Urban Dictionary. So I went along on this past Saturday wondering if any of the people from the Catalyst night would be there and what were we going to get up to for the day. Would we do something well and playful?

I ran into someone at the Cheung Sha Wan MTR station and after loading up on tuna buns, soy milk and coffee heading out for The Good Lab. Arriving around 1pm and there were a few people in a large, bright and varied work space with kitchen, work-tables, work-benches, chairs of various shapes and sizes. It quickly filled up with about 40 people. I was involved in two projects. I found my fellow team-member, we got into the wifi and had a few conversations with people wandering around looking for possible projects. We then set to work. I was working on reviewing open data public sector information websites around the world, Data.One Analysis Project. My team-member was working on a form for crowd-sourcing potential datasets around the HK government websites, Opening Data. Most of the time people were heads-down working with some small group meetings. It was possible to eves-drop on some conversations. This was a good way of knowing what skills people had and maybe asking them a question. Around 6:30pm the group reported on progress and asked for help if required. Pizza was delivered and we ate and chatted. We kept working until 11pm. photo credit: Yolanda Jinxin Ma
Up around 8am on Sunday and made my way back to Cheung Sha Wan by 10am. Most of the same people were there plus some more. Yesterday’s team-member was joined by 2 others. We figured out what we needed to do and worked until lunchtime. There was a feeling of anxiety in the crowd. Downstairs for a good Chinese lunch and we talked about what was wrong with Hong Kong with a recent arriver from Spain. Back to work until a bit after 6pm and we started giving presentations on the results. There were some truly amazing results and knowledge sharing on how it was done. People were very interested in anything dealing with maps and how to use the not so friendly mapping CSV files available from the Data.One site. The list of projects is here. Hopefully, they will be updated in the coming weeks. Here are three that I believe deserve a special mention (but they were all really good):

Legco Meeting Log Parser ~ extract the Hong Kong Legislative Council meeting transcript and voting record from PDF and make it available. It begs the question why this isn’t made available in document format with audio and video transcripts.

Reporting Tool for Request for Access to Information ~ a centralized form with sharable tracking of requests for information to the appropriate HK government bureau or department. Hopefully this will motivate our government to have true Freedom of Information legislation in the coming years.

Hong Kong food security and mainland’s two standard on food quality ~ a way of putting on a map where food is coming from out of China into Hong Kong. Food security and safety is a huge issue in China and Hong Kong. The HK government should be sharing as much information as possible with where our food comes from and what are the past problems.

A member of the OGCIO PSI team and Charles Mok, IT Sector Legislative Councillor came over around 6pm. We had some Raspberry Pi prizes donated by Pindar Wong. The prize was chosen by popular acclamation choosing Legco Meeting Log Parser and Charles Mok gave out the prize. An interesting RTHK video of an interview with Pindar and Charles is here.

Did we do something well and was it playful? The work-products from our projects were excellent. The energy level was high. People were working really well and collaboratively and the atmosphere was a lot more playful then I’ve experienced in the dreaded corporate cubicle world a la Dilbert. So now I know what a hackathon is about.

Telling a story is at the centre of my life. I start more than half of my conversations with ‘let me tell you this good story’. I’m always thinking,
“How does this story relate to my story?” I feel like I’m filling up my personal story bank. In the past few days I attended a workshop
‘Digital Storytelling on the Web’, a conference, ‘Beyond KM: Delivery Value’ and a lecture, ‘Flying with Madame Butterfly: Early Japan Airlines Advertising in the US and Hong Kong’.

The workshop was a pre-conference event. Alan Levine is a web educationalist; which sounds clumsy but it gives a sense of his work and interests. Alan took a small group through many websites and a few tools that could help us facilitate a digital story. All of them can be found on 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. A story is the most effective communication device humans have developed. ‘When you go outside this circle of fire something is likely to eat you’, remains one of the best reasons to remain close to the tribe. A digital story is not fundamentally different from a traditional spoken or visual story. Getting the audience’s attention and holding it is still the key challenge for the storyteller. The classic Freytag story arc still applies. However, a digital story may be more mixed up, more spontaneous or more complex with connecting images, sound, text and the possibility of the audience to dynamically manipulate the story.

These tools from the workshop will be useful:
• The closed wi-fi internet-like environment using ‘The StoryBox’ could be used to share text, images, audio and video without having to have it all up on the web.
• Pechaflickr and Five Card Flickr could help to get people talking, and exploring how a story unfolds. They are good for storytelling practice in a second language.

The Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society’s conference, ‘Beyond KM: Delivering Value’, brought together about 40 people to listen and share some stories on the slippery topic of ‘knowledge value’. Knowledge without value seems like a contradiction. One of the more valuable lessons coming out of knowledge management and into organizational practice is the importance of storytelling as a communication tool. Many knowledge managers like to emphasize that conversation is the key enabler for knowledge transfer. With that thought, we had lunch first and sat at around tables talking. This was much more useful than sitting through a morning of presentations full of coffee and sugary buns wondering what was for lunch.

Four presenters, all highly experienced in the practical application of knowledge management talked about how or what to do to reveal the value in knowledge:
• The emic/etic distinction of what people think vs. what they say must always be forefront when collecting information from the customer.
• Innovation comes out of conflict so finding that point of conflict leads to innovation.
• Perfection is not that important. Good-enough works most of the time.
• Combining machines with humans is likely going to be more effective than only one or the other approach.
• Tagging started with Assyrian clay tablets 3,000 years ago and not much has changed.
• Access, security, governance, mitigation and standardization make it highly problematic to replicate Facebook-like social media inside an organization.
• Worry about knowledge creation before worrying about knowledge management. This will solve a whole host of potential issues.
• Nothing will ever replace experience.
• Managing for the few big, important or calamitous events will always be prohibitively difficult and will likely fail.
• People are pattern recognizers not information processors.
• People blend the patterns they recognize to make a conceptual whole that has immediately useful meaning.
• 5 is the number of words we will remember, 15 is the number of people we trust and 150 is the number of people we can recognize.
• Big data must have people at the centre to make it useful.

I dashed back across the Hong Kong harbour to the Museum of History for the Anthropological Society monthly gathering. Yoshiko Nakano’s told the story on how two ex-GI ad-men out of San Francisco developed the geisha service for JAL (Japan Airlines) in the 1950’s that continued up to 1970. The story of ‘Flying with Madame Butterfly: Early Japan Airlines Advertising in the US and Hong Kong’, was more than just American GI’s fascination with exotic Japanese woman but also a real need to accept the Japanese as useful allies in the looming cold war. It was easier to accept a beautiful, gracious, charming and compliant geisha-clad woman over that man in the army cap and buckteeth America had been fighting only a few years previously. With advertising budget many time less than Pan Am or Northwest, these American ad-men hit on a sure winner; geisha’s in the air serving exhausted western businessmen. It worked perfectly and the concept of aircrew in national costumes has become a mainstay of the airline industry to this day. That Japanese woman working as flight attendants didn’t enjoy the experience of wearing kimono and weren’t much use in an emergency situation was ignored. The stereotypic compliant Asian woman is still with us today and owes quite a lot to these images promoted by JAL’s kimono service.

Stories help us understand the world we experience and give us a view into a world that is not our own. The digital world requires we actively manage our digital personality. Knowing how to tell a digital story will help keep control of our digital personality. The digital line between inside and outside the organization remains a dilemma for anyone using social media. Linking our digital personality to its context may help delineate the line for how to use social media in our digital lives. Images are a useful marketing tool but some images promote stereotypes that are difficult to stop once entrenched. Should we control how images are used in the digital world? Telling and listening to stories, blending and reflecting on them may change what we believe is valuable and worthwhile.

I went to the first day of Barcamp Hong Kong 2013 at HK Polytechnic University on Saturday, 23 February. This was my second Barcamp event. Last year was held all on one-day at City University of Hong Kong. Barcamp is a open-space inspired event where someone with an idea and the desire to talk about it makes a pitch to people who want to listen. The ‘law of two feet’ applies; if it isn’t interesting people can get up and leave for someone else presenting their idea. In practice, people write up very short descriptions of their idea and they are assigned a place to present. People can wander in and out as they like.

I got there on time at 9:45am for a 10:00 am start. This is the first time I’ve seen the 3D barcode registration work with iPhones. There weren’t too many people in the big open plaza at HKPolyU Design School with rows of chairs, a very large digital display screen and sound system. People were rather reluctant to sit in the chairs; I think because it had the ominous ‘lecture-look’ that might be difficult to get out away from easily. Perhaps it might have been better to arrange them in circles. By 11:00am people had filled out some half-size sheets of paper with topics and stuck them up on a brick wall. There was some consolidation as people with similar topics joined forces. Last year I seem to remember that each topic was given 30 minutes and it seemed too short. This year 1 hour seemed better but maybe too long for just one speaker.

The plaza at HKPolyU Design School

My first topic was ‘Fashion & Technology’. I like clothes I suppose about as much as anyone. I’m interested in why I choose the clothes I wear. HK is somewhat of a fashion centre but it suffers from creative anxiety. HK used to be a centre for making clothes and now is a place for organizing the making of clothes in China and then shipping them around the world. I wondered what these people would talk about it. The speaker was trying to get some sense of what people thought ‘fashion & technology’ should be about. People introduced themselves and why they choose to come to this topic. Most people were not working in the fashion field but were interested in wearable technology. I was somewhat amused when someone presented the new idea of using technology to make ‘custom-made’ clothes. I’m old fashioned and I still use a couple of HK tailors for suits, shirts and casual trousers from time to time. These tailors seem to keep track with big bound volumes where they write down my measurements and what I’ve ordered over the past 24 years. It’s nice when they ask me if I still wear the grey plaid jacket I had made in 1996. I think maybe technology and fashion could be used for custom made clothes but I’m not sure it will ever be as personal and good as an in-person tailor.

My second topic was from a grumpy old guy on ‘Lessons from Web 1.0 | That are still true today’. He wasn’t that old but he had been part of that first wave of web-developers in the 1990’s. He now works at one of the large banks in HK on trading algorithms. He made some useful observations that in the Web 1.0 days many plugins and be-spoke browser-sensing approaches were used to improve the web experience. These didn’t work well because most users do not keep their browser up to the latest version with all the appropriate plugins and writing code specific for Netscape, IE and Mosaic very quickly fell-down because it was impossible to test all the possible iterations of OS, hardware and browsers. Guess what? There are now 3 main browsers, IE, Chrome and Firefox and many other smaller ones used widely in specific countries and industries. Many times developers build applications assuming everyone is using the most recent version of Chrome on a high-end personal computer. The application fails and the user walks away. The lesson learned? Do not assume that everyone is a geeky computer person who enjoys hanging out with the PC. Most people do not want to have that much knowledge about the PC. They believe, correctly I will add, the PC should just work without a lot of fuss and bother. He recommended making applications work first with Lynx, a text based browser and then with other browsers. Assume someone in Kenya on a dial-up link is going to use the application. That person in Kenya could be generating 10 cents of revenue and if there are enough of them that could be what makes the application a success. There is an assumption among developers that applications are refreshed and being updated every few years. This is seldom true. Rather than being refreshed applications simply die from lack of use. Useful applications last for a long time and get changed incrementally with the danger that old code is still lurking around and being used as the core for more supposedly advanced applications. In the end, this may cause quite a few problems in the next wave of Web 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 world.

The last topic was Open Data in Hong Kong. The HK government has had the Data.One initiative since 2011 to make datasets available to the public for no cost. First, a developer presented his open source application using the HK Observatory (HKO) data. He hadn’t used the datasets available from Data.One for two reasons. First, he didn’t know the HKO dataset was available and second when he did find out about the dataset it was only a simple RSS text file and was not useful. Instead, he simply captured (scraped) the data from the websites maintained by the HKO. Next, someone talked about the Data.One initiative, the background and what was now happening. The gist of it seems to be that the government wants to make datasets available but not much effort if being made to coordinate what, why, how and who. Departmental Administrative Officers (AO) makes the datasets available based on their personal networks. The AO is an important person in the HK government structure but he/she is frequently very over-worked and normally has limited technical IT skills or knowledge. These AO’s have networks inside the government and they use for all sorts of activities. There is nothing wrong with this approach but the Data.One datasets are rather hit and miss. The last person talked about the context of Open Data initiatives in the EU and elsewhere. She said that the most active Open Data initiatives were in Berlin, London and New York. The big question is how to have more knowledge about the datasets and more use of them for application development. After these talks a Google+ group, Open Data Hong Kong, was setup. Hopefully, this may become a platform to promote these Data.One datasets.

It seems like a simple question and should have a simple answer. However, all too often projects that are proclaimed as successful seem much less so when closely scrutinized or just a few months after the project was ‘signed-off’ to great fanfare. The word ‘projects’ conjures up images of information technology, system implementations, change management processes, training, learning and development programmes. Do these share anything in common besides having a definite beginning, middle and hopeful ending? They almost always involve that other modern word in organizational effort ‘the team’. A team is temporary whereas the outcome of a project is seldom thought of as a temporary event. A project could arrive at a conclusive event that will be used to make a decision. This is the typical prototype and pilot that is much touted in system implementations but too often the decision has been made before the prototype or pilot even starts. A project may result in a conclusive event that people do things differently. The conclusive event could be an information technology system, a new or changed process, training and learning about how to do something with some payoff towards betterment.

Formal research and anecdotal evident across the spectrum of project management methodology, information technology implementation methodology, business process change methodology and human resource development show that a large percentage of such projects in both SME and large organizations are failures. This is almost never pointed out by the external consulting industry, both the large and well-known practices (Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey, and so on) and the thousands of smaller and independent consulting practitioners.

In 1995 the Standish Group reported that 31% of IT projects in the United States were cancelled before completion and 52% were 89% over budget. Further more only 16% of software projects could be considered successful. The numbers do not get much better for the period 1996 to 2010.

Ken Grant from Ryerson University evaluated 45 KM projects from the late 1990’s to 2010 and found that only 45% / 21 were considered to be successful. Why would anyone try to implement anything that will fail 55% of the time?

Gartner recently released statistics showing that at the end of 2012 technology is only used to 43% of its potential. Why would any organization spend time, effort and money on technology which fails 57% of the time?

Training, learning and education disciplines have been investigating for decades how to first help children and then adults acquire knowledge and use it in their work and lives. Much has been written but no holy grail has been found. Diane Laufenberg sums is up nicely in the Ted Talk in 2010 on learning through failure and real experience and not looking for the right answer.

They are both well worth following for any project. They give some assurance that the project is more likely to finish at an agreed upon time and at an agreed upon cost with a list of features agreed upon in advance. They do not guarantee project success or project benefit.

The most important criterion for project success is the extent of use over a period of time. These are questions to ask about a system, process or programme after it has been put into place.

Is the new system, process or programme being used one year, two years or three years after implementation?

If there is no use after one year then it has failed.

If there is use for one year it is somewhat a success, after two years a definite success and three years it is a star performer.

Was the system, process or programme significantly upgraded within one year, two years or three years after implementation?

A significant upgrade, revamp or redeployment within the first year is a probable sign it is a failure.

A significant upgrade, revamp or redeployment within two years may mean it was of some use but didn’t meet expectations.

A significant upgrade, revamp or redeployment within three years shows a clear success and a desire to keep using a successful system, process or programme to fit new or different circumstances.

This is some harsh advice but it will improve project success over time inside most organizations. As a general rule, system implementations, organizational change management initiatives and training and learning programs should be done in-house whenever possible. Organizations should only use external consultants to acquire the knowledge to learn how to do the work. This way, the organization has the skills to adjust the system, process or program after it has started to be used. Bluntly, do not use external consultants to collect requirements or perform implementation work because they will minimize the difficulty when collecting requirements and will not be available after implementation to make adjustments. When external consultants are used for requirements collection or implementation their fees should be structured so that a significant proportion of their fee (40% to 60%) should be paid one year after the project completion sign-off.

I was in Macau over the weekend for two reasons. First, to attend the graduation of a former Galaxy Entertainment colleague who had gone back to university as a mature student and second to spend some time at the “International Forum on UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW) International Advisory Committee-Working Group “Education and Research”, sponsored by the Macao Foundation and the Macau Documentation and Information Society. Graduations are always good events; all that work being acknowledged by friends and family and the sense of personal accomplishment. Our education is such a large part of our ‘personal history’. This made me remember that education is the wisest move I’ve every made, even when I didn’t do that well. I caught the opening of the MoW conference and then almost all of the first two presentations; Dr. Roslyn Russell, Chair of the International Advisory Committee of UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and then Professor Lothar Jordan, Chair of UNESCO MoW IAC Working Group Education and Research. I returned in the afternoon for a round-table discussion with Dr. Russell, Prof. Jordan and about a dozen others.

Memory of the World – what a great name for a cause and organization. What is it about? I’m going to say it is about capturing, documenting, interpreting and inspiring the memory of people. This particular part of it was focused on ‘documentary heritage’ – the written artifacts of memory. Macau has the well-deserved reputation in the Perl River Delta of being more historically aware and sensitive than either Hong Kong or Guangdong province. Its 400-year history as the final port-of-call in the Portuguese empire has given Macau a magical quality. Now dotted with gleaming fairy-tale casinos and rebranded as the Las Vegas of the East it has ample public funding for remembering its past. Oddly though, we didn’t talk about the specific documents from Macau very much at this forum. Maybe they did in the bit I missed in the morning but I don’t think so. The afternoon discussion was trying to figure out how the Macao Foundation could implement a feasible memory of Macau programme that could become part of the Memory of the World.

“The answer is to leave history”, which is something I’ve heard or read or seen but can’t place at the moment but kept running through my head as I listened to the group of historians, archivists and librarians talk about MoW and Macau. I’m pretty sure what they mean by memory is ‘personal history’ and not place or organizational history. Those memories, which are more personal and only understood once experienced. There was talk of a workshop which didn’t sound appropriate to me so I proposed a series of facilitated conversations about memory in Macau. Right away, this begged the question of who should/would/could attend these facilitated conversations? Should it only be academics, librarians, archivists and other information professionals? We agreed it should be more than just these professionals although they had skills and knowledge about memory, history, archives and documents that would be useful to know and learn. I would want to include people from the performing arts. My experience in Macau is that dancers, poets, playwrights, musicians are frequently mining their own Macau stories for their creative work. I would want the conversations to target identifiable groups; for example, Macau’s secondary school students, woman, recent immigrants, creative artists, academic and information professionals and so on. Two young men had many insightful comments. Inaciso Pangchi Chan from the Macau Heritage Ambassador Association noted that the Macau Archives were essentially inaccessible to the Macau public because the archival materials were frequently in Portuguese and most of the public only speak, read or write Chinese. The Ambassador Association organizes small group tours of 10 or less people for local Macau residents and these are frequently over subscribed showing a real passion for understanding local history in Macau. He noted that over half of Macau’s residents had only recently arrived in Macau and too frequently knew almost nothing about the history of Macau. Most alarmingly many young people in Macau didn’t know where the famous ‘Ruins of St. Paul’ were located, in the early 17th century the largest Catholic Cathedral in Asia. There is very little if any Macau history being taught in the secondary schools. This is due to a lack of teaching materials and there are no secondary school examinations on Macau history. I suspect failing to teach local or recent history is a common failing in many places. Hong Kong suffers from the same lack of local history in its secondary schools. Dr. Sharif Shams Imon from Macau’s Institute for Tourism Studies proposed that there should be some end-result for these conversations, for example, an exhibition or series of seminars. We agreed that this would be a good approach. As with most around the table discussions, the coffee break was lively and gave us a chance to talk in small groups. Hong Kong’s recent experience with national education and the strong public reaction against it was one of the threads. Focusing on ‘correct history’ by the middle and upper classes in Macau was another thread. Whitewashing history happens without people even imagining that they are doing it.

So if the Macao Foundation does try to run facilitated conversations on memory, personal history and the Memory or the World what should they do? I can imagine a series David Gurteen inspired knowledge cafés, Bohm Dialogues and Open Space Technology facilitated events run over a period of 3 to 6 months leading to an exhibition of the created and collected documents. I’ll be interested to see what happens in Macau with Memory of the World over the next 12 months or so. The answer is to leave history.

I went to the International Association of Facilitators Asia Conference 29-30 September in Shenzhen, China. Here is the Facebook page. The conference was hosted locally by Leadership, Inc., based in Shenzhen and organized by the IAF Asia Conference committee. It was so useful to spend a few days with 80 facilitators from across Asia and learn from them. There were 4 large group activities and 16 break-out sessions to choose from during the main 2-day conference.

Facilitation is something that I learned about when I was doing my Msc in Knowledge Management at HK Polytechnic. I realized that I had ‘been facilitated’ many times over the years working in organizations. I learned some facilitation techniques in that programme and in some other workshops and gatherings over the past few years. Knowledge management is so much of the time trying to get people to have a meaningful conversation, which are both relevant to the organization and leads to sharing and exchange of knowledge. It is not easy to achieve since most of the time the typical meeting is not about a conversation between equals but rather about direction or control. That deadly PowerPoint presentation which no one listens to because they are busy watching their phones is a real-world phenomenon. All too common are neetings where no one but the lead and her chief lieutenant speak and then the real meeting happens later in small groups of 2 or 3. Frequently the consensus after the meeting is ‘we are not going to do that’.

What can be done to have more meaningful exchange inside an organization? I believe many of the techniques facilitators use should become part of everyone’s toolkit for working inside an organization. What should be in this toolkit? Ways of making people comfortable, ways of breaking down barriers between internal groups and cliques and ways of highlighting to people there preconceived notions and biases. Here are a few simple techniques that I feel may help:

– Let people settle in their seat with the people they know, have a short conversation and then have them count off up to the total number of tables – 1 – 8 if there are 8 tables. Then ask all the number 1’s to go to table 1 and all the number 2’s to go to table 2. This gets people sitting away from their colleagues and friends but gives them a bit of comfort in the beginning. It works best in a bigger group.

– Collect many postcards and spread them out on a table or the floor. Ask people to choose one postcard that best describe themselves. When people go back to their table ask them to explain to their group why they made this choice. This works well to let people reveal themselves to a small group.

– Get colourful hoops of string and make circles on the floor. Ask people to gather in the hoops based on how they define themselves. Once gathered, ask them to explain how they feel. This works well when you want people to become aware of how groups exclude and include others. I learned this from Masako Arakane from Qualia, Inc. at the conference.
Nationality
Ethnic Group / Race
Height
Age
Gender
Eye Colour
How they feel about being a member of this group
How they feel about being at this event

– Pose a question or a topic and have rounds of conversations for 5 or 10 minutes were in each round the groups change. Big paper on tables can let people jot down notes but it isn’t necessary. This is a world café sometimes called a knowledge café.

There are many other facilitation techniques and if you have an experienced facilitator it is of great value to use him or her to help guide the conversation process. However, you may want to try to learn some of these techniques yourself. Knowledge management success hinges on sharing, openness, flatness and transparency. If you want to have more meaningful conversations every time you have a meeting or gathering in your organization I recommend taking a look at these sites for more information.

The conference participants were diverse but most interestingly there were over 20 experienced facilitators from Japan. The IAF Japan chapter has over 1,500 members. It will host the IAF Asia 2013 conference in Tokyo. As I’ve frequently noticed, Japan has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in how to work with and with-in organizations. However, sharing this knowledge with the rest of Asia seldom seems to be a priority. As someone said to me at the conference, the Japanese have a culture of listening and reaching out is quite difficult for the Japanese. This may be true but I’m never so sure about cultural pronouncements. I recommend getting to the IAF – Asia conference, 19 – 22 September 2013, in Tokyo and listening carefully. There is some excellent facilitation work going on in Japan.